09/2009
VOL. 52 NO. 09
Practice
Contributed Articles
Virtual Extension
64 Sound Index: Charts For the People,
By the People
Mining the wisdom of the online
crowds generates music business
intelligence, identifying what’s hot
and what’s not.
By Varun Bhagwan, Tyrone Grandison,
and Daniel Gruhl
As with all magazines, page limitations often
prevent the publication of articles that might
otherwise be included in the print edition.
To ensure timely publication, ACM created
Communications’ Virtual Extension (VE).
VE articles undergo the same rigorous review
process as those in the print edition and are
accepted for publication on their merit. These
articles are now available to ACM members in
the Digital Library.
71 What Intellectual Property Law
Should Learn from Software
Software’s close encounters
with the law provide some lessons
for our future.
By James Boyle
Ballot Box Communication
in Online Communities
Mu Xia, Yun Huang, Wenjing Duan,
and Andrew B. Whinston
44 Reveling in Constraints
The Google Web Toolkit is
an end-run around Web
development obstacles.
By Bruce Johnson
49 Monitoring and Control
of Large Systems with MonALISA
MonALISA developers describe how
it works, the key design principles
behind it, and the biggest technical
challenges in building it.
By Iosif Legrand, Ramiro Voicu,
Catalin Cirstoiu, Costin Grigoras,
Latchezar Betev, and Alexandru Costan
56 Making Sense of
Revision-Control Systems
All revision-control systems come
with complicated sets of trade-offs.
How do you find the best match
between tool and team?
By Bryan O’Sullivan
Review Article
78 The Status of the P versus NP Problem
It’s one of the fundamental
mathematical problems of our time,
and its importance grows with the
rise of powerful computers.
By Lance Fortnow
Research Highlights
88 Technical Perspective
Abstraction for Parallelism
By Katherine Yelick
89 Optimistic Parallelism
Requires Abstractions
By Milind Kulkarni,
Keshav Pingali, Bruce Walter,
Ganesh Ramanarayanan,
Kavita Bala, and L. Paul Chew
Examining User Involvement in
Continuous Software Development
Achita (Mi) Muthitacharoen
and Khawaja A. Saeed
Constructive Function-based
Modeling in Multilevel Education
Alexander Pasko and Valery Adzhiev
One Size Does Not Fit All:
Legal Protection for
Non-Copyrightable Data
Hongwei Zhu and Stuart E. Madnick
The State of Corporate
Web Site Accessibility
Eleanor T. Loiacono, Nicholas C.
Romano, Jr., and Scott McCoy
Reducing Employee Computer
Crime through Situational
Crime Prevention
Robert Willison and Mikko Siponen
Article development led by
queue.acm.org
98 Technical Perspective
They Do Click, Don’t They?
By Marc Dacier
Modified Agile Practices for
Outsourced Software Projects
Dinesh Batra
ILLUs TRATIon By joHn HERsEy
99 Spamalytics: An Empirical Analysis
of Spam Marketing Conversion
By Chris Kanich, Christian Kreibich,
Kirill Levchenko, Brandon Enright,
Geoffrey M. Voelker, Vern Paxson,
and Stefan Savage
Technical Opinion
Falling into the Net: Main Street
America Playing Games and
Making Friends Online
James Katz and Ronald E. Rice